306 SCIENCE TEACHING. 



botany and zoology, while circulating dec. Permutation, annuities, duo- 

 decimals, princi^Jles of L. C. M. & G. C. D., progression, the extraction of 

 the fifteenth root, arbitration and the endless details of geology and gram- 

 mar, plunder the time which rightfully belongs to physiology, natural 

 philosophy and chemistry. 



Every performance of duty, every calculation, every forecasting of prob- 

 abilities, and every act of life, is performed by the judgment and not by the 

 memor}^ Science most completely prepares one for this work. Many 

 branches, now excessively taught, do not afford a field for the free exercise 

 of judgment, and largely such is the character of the classics, history and the 

 mathematics. These present inviting range on the sole condition that the 

 pupil admits certain facts, definitions and axioms, and from these, not losing 

 sight of them for a moment, "he advances in the groove of thought," which 

 has been so unkindly marked out for him. It is noticeable that the prob- 

 lems in arithmetic contain only those factors necessary to a solution. To a 

 certain extent he loses his personality, while his individuality is not only 

 hemmed in by boundary walls but is finally swallowed up by the authority 

 of the teacher, and the well picketed gulf of the lexicon. In life, the facts 

 with which he deals have been classified by no kindly hand, and among 

 these diverse interests, conflicting elements, the strange objects and the 

 stranger phenomena, he stands perplexed, confused, and well nigh power- 

 less. Each person commands the art of reasoning to the extent that he has 

 not learned its formulae, varieties and rules, but practiced them (whether or 

 not they have been definitely formulated). The formation of judgments and 

 the processes of reasoning are practiced by the race, inexactly by the many, 

 tolerably by some, and correctly by a fewi Science appeals to individual 

 reason and individual responsibility; its truths are determined by no author- 

 ity but nature herself; it furnishes a knowledge of what is and, to a limited 

 extent, what is not ; it teaches us to distinguish what is known and what is 

 probable, and to know facts as distinguished from their various interpreta- 

 tions. Dr. Porter says that in the education of the judgment science has no 

 equal. How many problems in life there are, whose solution dej)ending only 

 upon judgment, awaits a master mind — corporal and capital punishment 

 suffrage, legislation, recreative amusements, Sunday laws, rights of citizen- 

 ship, capital and labor, prison discipline, currency, intemperance, taxation 

 and Prof. Tice. Only the most thorough culture of the mental powers, by 

 use, can enable the race to cope with the ever-increasing demand of civiliza- 

 tion, even in a tolerable manner. Witness, too, the one hundred "isms" that 

 press their claims for man's recognition. One demands a faith which rests 

 upon certain phenomena, while the phenomena allow examination only 

 on conditions that forbid acceptance ; another, a belief in the invariability 

 of the so-called natural laws whose universality investigation has rendered 

 only probable ; another, an uncritical faith in authenticated history, whether 

 it accords with or contravenes the use of good sense. 



The present age demands what the past did not require, and it is proba- 



